A self-adaptive differential evolution with application on the ALSTOM gasifier

Ever since its conception, differential evolution (DE) has gathered a reputation for being a powerful yet simple global stochastic optimiser with continually outperforming many of the already existing stochastic and direct search global optimisation techniques. In this paper, Differential Evolution, and in particular, the sensitivity of its performance to settings of its control parameters is studied and a simple adaptive scheme is proposed for the DE control parameters. The performance of this proposed approach is studied with the use of some benchmark problems and applied to a difficult control systems design case study.